Marketing Tips For Small Businesses: Why Persevering Can be a Horrible Idea

You need to be flexible in your approach not only to online advertising but to reaching any of your goals in life.

We live in a culture that promotes perseverance as the number one reason that separates those who are successful from those who aren’t and this is a huge problem.

I’ve seen hundreds of business articles that argued the main reason a business will succeed or fail is due to whether or not the founder persevered or not.

While persevering certainly is important in many aspects of life YOU HAVE TO KNOW WHEN TO TRY SOMETHING ELSE or you’re going to be in for a world of disappointment and bad results.

With my internet marketing agency I work with many companies, some small and some big, that are trying to grow their businesses.

What I see repeatedly is founders that keep doing the exact same things and expecting a different result.

Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over & over again and expecting different results”.

By this definition, there are a lot of insane founders.

I don’t really blame them, though, I have definitely been there as well.

It’s easy to get in a habit loop and sometimes it takes someone else to drop kick us in the head to get out of it.

This is why you need to REGULARLY SYSTEMATICALLY EVALUATE PROGRESS so you know when it’s time to move on and TRY SOMETHING ELSE.

For example, I will see companies hire a marketing company on a large retainer and work with them for years even though they aren’t making any progress what so ever.

Now don’t get me wrong, marketing is not easy and certainly usually does not happen overnight.

If it was easy everyone would be rich.

Optimistically it will take four to six months to get a campaign to become profitable and often it will take longer than that.

The reality is many campaigns never end up working and any company that guarantees profitable campaigns is feeding you horse shit.

With that said I always recommend giving pay per click advertising a good try because if you get it to work you basically created an ATM in your house.

You can literally make money in your sleep.

The good thing about online advertising is that you can systematically evaluate the progress of them very easily. If nobody is clicking on your ads then you will have a low click through rate and then there is likely a problem with your:

Ad copy;

Imagery;

Or who you are targeting.

If your ads are working and you are getting lots of traffic but nobody is purchasing your product you likely have a problem with:

Your landing page design / layout;

Your core value proposition;

Your sales copy;

Or your price;

There are some other factors as well but these are the core ones involved in creating a profitable online marketing campaign.

You want to measure all of these factors to access progress and change your path on a weekly basis.

The problem is that very few companies actually do this in an intelligent way.

All they look at usually is gross sales or gross traffic and they trust that the marketing company is taking care of all the specifics.

Trusting your marketing company is fine, but they should be able to produce specific monthly reports on how campaigns are improving or not improving.

If your campaigns are showing zero signs of progress after a few months, and you have the statistics to back this YOU NEED TO CHANGE YOUR APPROACH.

This sounds so simple but there are few companies who actually do this.

They will hire a marketing company, get zero useful data on progress or lack of progress and have them continue to work for them for YEARS.

Persevering even if there are zero signs of progress for a while is fine but you have to know when to draw the line.

This can be tricky.

Firstly, if the marketing company you hired can’t give you meaningful data on the progress of your campaigns get them to and if they don’t fire them.

Secondly, if have tried dozens of different marketing techniques over a year or two and nothing has progressed significantly you probably want to shift ideas completely.

Meaning your business idea may be a horrible idea and persevering would be an idiotic endeavour.

I’m not saying you should abandon the industry you are in all together but you may want to try a completely different approach altogether.

For example, if you are selling supplements and it’s not working at all after a year or two try selling something else in the fitness industry.

Or move into an industry that is far less competitive and totally different.

If you are flexible in your approach and evaluate progress regularly you are going to get where you want to go much faster.

Whether it’s an ad campaign, a fitness goal, or any other goal in your life you should always be accessing evaluating and changing direction when necessary.

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